from that argument between thom yorke (of radiohead) & howard zinn...
(full text @ http://www.alternet.org/story/17242 )
QUESTION: would you say that there's a place for both directly political and non-political artists? What importance do you think each have?
Zinn: There are all sorts of artists. There are artists who really don't have a social consciousness, who don't see that there's a connection between art and life in a way that compels the artist to look around the world and see what is wrong and try to use his or her art to change that. There are artists who just entertain. You can look upon entertainment as something useful, as we don't want to eliminate art which is only entertaining, and insist that all art must be political, must be revolutionary, must be transforming.
But there's a place for comedy and music and the circus and things that don't really have an awful effect on society except to entertain people -- to make people feel good, and to act as a kind of religion. That is what Marx called the "opium of the people," something that people need. They need distraction.
So it does serve a purpose, but if that's all that artists do, the entertainment that you seek will become permanent. The misery that people live under and the wars that people have to go through, that will become permanent. There are huge numbers of people in the world whose lives are bound, limited. Lives of sheer misery, of sickness and violence. In order to change that you need to have artists who will be conscious of that, who will use their art in such a way that it helps to transform society. It may not be a blunt instrument, but it will have a kind of poetic effect.
Yorke: Yeah, I don't think we are political at all, I think I'm hyper aware of the soapbox thing. It is difficult to make political art work. If all it does is exist in the realms of political discussion, it's using that language, and generally, it's an ugly language. It is very dead, definitely not a thing of beauty. The only reason, I think, that we go anywhere near it is because, like any reason that we buy music, these things get absorbed. These are the things surrounding your life. If you sit down and try to do it purposefully, and try to change this with this, and do this with that, it never works.
I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape. But there are different ways to escape. I think escape is sort of like coming to a show with ten thousand other people and responding to that moment. Sharing that moment -- that's escape. Wherever the music came from originally is secondary to what's happening at that moment, how the music sends you somewhere else. That's the important thing.
Zinn: It's true that much of political language is ugly. We have to cherish those political writers whose language is beautiful, like Arundhati Roy, or Barbara Kingsolver, including those whose political language is funny, like Michael Moore. And it's possible to react to such ugliness by saying music should not try to be overtly political because it will lose its beauty. But that doesn't have to happen. Look at Dylan. Very strongly political, but poetic.
Yorke: My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art. The first requirement is that it's good art, and if it is, then there's a sense of escape. But I'm biased. I don't think that, to escape, it has to be bland at all. I've never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There's always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music. If you look at "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer, in the lyrics and the way it runs, it feels really escapist but there's a huge darkness over all the sounds and the way she is singing it. Just past that escapism is the representation of what's around you. If you paint it all away, then you have no sense of uplift, because it has no sense of identification. It's nonsense for its own sake, like much of the political discourse in mainstream media. It has a language of its own, but refers to fuck-all, really.
Zinn: I don't think there's anything wrong with escapism, or what you might call pure entertainment with no whiff of politics. We need that in our lives, not to take up all of our life, but to give us a glimpse of a world in which we don't have to think about politics and its terrible battles.
(full text @ http://www.alternet.org/story/17242 )
QUESTION: would you say that there's a place for both directly political and non-political artists? What importance do you think each have?
Zinn: There are all sorts of artists. There are artists who really don't have a social consciousness, who don't see that there's a connection between art and life in a way that compels the artist to look around the world and see what is wrong and try to use his or her art to change that. There are artists who just entertain. You can look upon entertainment as something useful, as we don't want to eliminate art which is only entertaining, and insist that all art must be political, must be revolutionary, must be transforming.
But there's a place for comedy and music and the circus and things that don't really have an awful effect on society except to entertain people -- to make people feel good, and to act as a kind of religion. That is what Marx called the "opium of the people," something that people need. They need distraction.
So it does serve a purpose, but if that's all that artists do, the entertainment that you seek will become permanent. The misery that people live under and the wars that people have to go through, that will become permanent. There are huge numbers of people in the world whose lives are bound, limited. Lives of sheer misery, of sickness and violence. In order to change that you need to have artists who will be conscious of that, who will use their art in such a way that it helps to transform society. It may not be a blunt instrument, but it will have a kind of poetic effect.
Yorke: Yeah, I don't think we are political at all, I think I'm hyper aware of the soapbox thing. It is difficult to make political art work. If all it does is exist in the realms of political discussion, it's using that language, and generally, it's an ugly language. It is very dead, definitely not a thing of beauty. The only reason, I think, that we go anywhere near it is because, like any reason that we buy music, these things get absorbed. These are the things surrounding your life. If you sit down and try to do it purposefully, and try to change this with this, and do this with that, it never works.
I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape. But there are different ways to escape. I think escape is sort of like coming to a show with ten thousand other people and responding to that moment. Sharing that moment -- that's escape. Wherever the music came from originally is secondary to what's happening at that moment, how the music sends you somewhere else. That's the important thing.
Zinn: It's true that much of political language is ugly. We have to cherish those political writers whose language is beautiful, like Arundhati Roy, or Barbara Kingsolver, including those whose political language is funny, like Michael Moore. And it's possible to react to such ugliness by saying music should not try to be overtly political because it will lose its beauty. But that doesn't have to happen. Look at Dylan. Very strongly political, but poetic.
Yorke: My argument would be that I don't think there is much that's genuinely political art that is good art. The first requirement is that it's good art, and if it is, then there's a sense of escape. But I'm biased. I don't think that, to escape, it has to be bland at all. I've never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There's always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music. If you look at "I Feel Love" by Donna Summer, in the lyrics and the way it runs, it feels really escapist but there's a huge darkness over all the sounds and the way she is singing it. Just past that escapism is the representation of what's around you. If you paint it all away, then you have no sense of uplift, because it has no sense of identification. It's nonsense for its own sake, like much of the political discourse in mainstream media. It has a language of its own, but refers to fuck-all, really.
Zinn: I don't think there's anything wrong with escapism, or what you might call pure entertainment with no whiff of politics. We need that in our lives, not to take up all of our life, but to give us a glimpse of a world in which we don't have to think about politics and its terrible battles.
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